Diabase: Towards a Diachronic BLARK in Support of Historical Studies

AbstractWe present our ongoing work on language technology-based e-science in the humanities, social sciences and education, with a focus on text-based research in the historical sciences. An important aspect of language technology is the research infrastructure known by the acronym BLARK (Basic LAnguage Resource Kit). A BLARK as normally presented in the literature arguably reflects a modern standard language, which is topic- and genre-neutral, thus abstracting away from all kinds of language variation. We argue that this notion could fruitfully be extended along any of the three axes implicit in this characterization (the social, the topical and the temporal), in our case the temporal axis, towards a diachronic BLARK for Swedish, which can be used to develop e-science tools in support of historical studies.